Thursday, April 28, 2016

As
a young boy, I used to think my grandma very strange. In her bedroom
she kept a suitcase, packed and ready for use at a moment’s notice.
“Just in case,” she’d tell me when I asked where it was that she was
always waiting to go to. “You never know when they’ll turn on the Jews.”

Her
house in Northwood was epitome of suburban comfort, and I couldn’t
understand what on earth she meant. Until, that is, I learned some
history – including the history of the Jews. Which is, in short, that
pretty much everywhere, they have turned on the Jews.

From
my teens through my twenties and thirties, the fact that I am Jewish
meant little to me beyond the Jonathan Miller sense of being Jew-ish. I
adored beigels, matzoh balls, Seinfeld and Woody Allen more than your
average gentile would think they deserved. And that was about it. If
you’d asked me, I’d have told you that after the Holocaust, real,
serious anti-Semitism – the sort where Jews were killed for being Jews,
rather than the odd nasty comment – was a thing of the past, in
civilised Europe, at least.

Then
something happened. 9/11, to be specific. I realised something was up
that I didn’t really understand. So I read and read and read. And then
read some more – especially the words of the terrorists and their fellow
Islamists. They were explicit and open. Jews were the enemy.
All their "issues" with the West pivoted, in the end, on their Jew
hate. So I immersed myself even more in the issues around terrorism and
Islamism. Because, you see, it mattered.

It matters, of course, to
all of us, because – as we have seen both on 9/11 and ever since,
Islamist terrorism is not specific in its targeting. But it matters to
me more, I would say, than anything else I can think of. Because
although these maniacs will happily kill anyone, they say, and their subsequent murders show, that – quite specifically – they want to kill me.
A Jew. So on level I am not in the least bit shocked, or even
surprised, by the reemergence of Jew hatred as a thing in recent years.
By what arrogance would we think that our generation, alone in history,
would be free of the oldest hatred?

But
on another, more visceral level, it chills me to the bone. And it’s not
the terrorists. They threaten me, of course, as they threaten us all.
Yet to me, the real chill comes from their fellow travelers – the useful
idiots of the terrorists and Jew-murderers who say they do not have a
racist bone in their body, but when it comes to Jews, a blind spot
emerges. The likes, to be blunt, of the now suspended Ken Livingstone,
who claims never to have come across a single example of Anti-semitism
in the Labour Party. He clearly has never looked in the mirror. Much has
been written – especially by the brilliant Nick Cohen
– on the "Red/Green Alliance"; the phenomenon by which a swathe of the
Left has linked up with radical Islam, leading to the bizarre spectacle
of Leftist feminists supporting Islamists who would cut off the hands of
women who read books.

With "anti-Western-imperialism" as part of
the glue binding the alliance, everything else falls into place. So
Hamas and Hezbollah might have as their defining goal the elimination of
an entire people from the face of the earth, but that unfortunate
consequence for Jews is by the by, because Hamas and Hezbollah are freedom fighters.

Many
critics of the students protesting racism so vociferously on college
campuses these days say they are just "whiners" who need to accept that
life isn’t perfect and get back to their books. Political correctness
has run so rampant, these critics say, that it threatens freedom of
speech. Both claims are reductive analyses of something more complex.

But
the fact is that one need not suffer from residual bigotry, or even
mere incomprehension, to find something amiss in the furious building
takeovers, indignant slates of radical demands, and claims that life on
today’s college campuses is an endless experience of racism. Protest is
crucial in an enlightened and complex society, but something has indeed
gone wrong — and college leaders and the faculty share as much of the
blame as the students.

The "whiny" analysis is hasty — the
now-famous lists of students’ demands always include some legitimate
concerns. For example, if I were an undergraduate at Princeton today,
Woodrow Wilson’s name on university buildings would rankle me. I am
given neither to street-style protest nor to the idea that public
buildings must be purged of the names of all figures whose social views
we now find unpleasant. But Wilson, for all of his accomplishments, was
especially bigoted even for his era and Southern origins.

More to
the point, the claim that a college campus should be a locus of
absolutely unfettered free speech is a pose. There are certain opinions
and topics which an enlightened society can today justifiably exclude
from discussion. No university any of us would want to be associated
with would entertain "free speech" in favor of genocide, slavery, or
withdrawing women’s right to vote, even in the vein of airing them in
order to review the arguments against them, as John Stuart Mill advised
be done with repugnant ideas. There comes a point where all will agree
that we have made at least some progress in social history and, in the
interests of time and energy, need not revisit issues that have been
decided. The question, however, is which issues, and this is where our
current student protesters err in their confidence.

The tenor of
their protests is founded on an assumption — tacit but, like most tacit
assumptions, decisive — that they are battling something as
unequivocally, conclusively intolerable as genocide, slavery, or the
withdrawal of women’s suffrage: namely, "racism." And of course, none of
us are in favor of racism, which allows their rhetoric a certain
potency. One resists opposing a battle declared on such terms. However,
these students have been allowed to suppose that racism is a much
simpler concept than it is. The reason they come off as "whiners" is
because their demands address problems more specific than "racism," ones
that are very much up for intelligent, civil debate.

For example,
what is a microaggression? What is the proper response to experiencing
one, or being accused of having committed one? These are rich issues. In
New York City it has been classified
as a microaggression for affluent, white high school students to
discuss their expensive vacations around black students. But then, on
most campuses, it is also considered a microaggression to assume that
most black people are poor. What is the etiquette here? Respectable
minds will differ. Black campus protesters have claimed that it is a
microaggression when a black student is expected to testify to the black
experience in a class discussion. However, this runs up against one of
the main planks of race-conscious admissions policies: that having black
students on campus is valuable for exposing others to black experiences
and concerns. There is no easy answer here, which is why, again, a
discussion is appropriate. To dismiss as "racist" any questions about
such issues is simplistic.

A recently published book, “70Candles! Women Thriving in Their 8th Decade,”
inspired me to take a closer look at how I’m doing as I approach 75 and
how I might make the most of the years to come. It would be a good idea
for women in my age cohort to do likewise. With a quarter of American
women age 65 expected to live into their 90s, there could be quite a few
years to think about.

It’s not the first
time I’ve considered the implications of longevity. When one of my
grandsons at age 8 asked, “Grandma, will you still be alive when I get
married?” I replied, “I certainly hope so. I want to dance at your
wedding.” But I followed up with a suggestion that he marry young!

Still,
his innocent query reminded me to continue to pursue a healthy
lifestyle of wholesome food, daily exercise and supportive social
connections. While there are no guarantees, like many other women now in
their 70s, I’ve already outlived both my parents, my mother having died
at 49 and my father at 71.

If I have one
fear as the years climb, it’s that I won’t be able to fit in all I want
to see and do before my time is up, so I always plan activities while I
can still do them.

I book cycling and
hiking trips to parts of the world I want to visit and schedule visits
to distant friends and family to be sure I make them happen. In a most
pragmatic moment, I crocheted a gender-neutral blanket for my first
great-grandchild, but attached a loving note in case I’m no longer
around to give it in person.

Of course,
advancing age has taken — and will continue to take — its incremental
toll. I often wake up wobbly, my back hates rainy days, and I no longer
walk, cycle or swim as fast as I used to. I wear sensible shoes and hold
the handrail going up and down stairs.

I
know too that, in contrast to the Energizer Bunny life I once led, I now
have to husband my resources more carefully. While I’m happy to prepare
a dish or two for someone else’s gathering, my energy for and interest
in hosting dinner parties have greatly diminished. And though I love to
go to the theater, concerts, movies and parties, I also relish spending
quiet nights at home with my Havanese, Max, for company.

I've never much felt a need to go through life avoiding offending
people. I remember people being offended with my being a hippie, a dyke
and a whole bunch of other things.This is
why I'm so anti-political correctness. I have a hard time seeing much
difference between left wing and right wing Social Justice Warriors.
They all want to infringe on other peoples rights.

A
new film about the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is a shocking and
brilliant reminder of the devastation HIV and Aids wreaked – and still
does

There are many shocking images in the brilliant new documentary Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures,
made by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. You probably know many of them
already. Some are just seared into our culture and no longer disturb
anyone. The cover of Horses with Patti Smith
was as much of a statement as her music. His celebrity pics of
Eurotrash and rich collectors, or actual celebs such as Debbie Harry and
Bianca whispering in Mick Jagger’s ear remain fascinating. Their beauty blasted by his light into timelessness; his naked flowers,
the sex organs of plants in all their glory. As he said himself, he
could perfect a bowl of carnations just as well as “a fist up someone’s
ass”. Then there was the documentation of his S&M activities and his
fetishisation of the black body – so many of these images remain, to
use the word du jour, “problematic”. Good. His life was an
artwork. He would pick up guys, do drugs, have sex and then get down to
work. He would photograph them.

When you see these pictures, you
wonder why – with sexual imagery everywhere all the time – these
pictures linger, hanging somewhere in a dark part of the collective
memory. You keep looking because he kept seeing.

In this film, we have Mapplethorpe in his own words, not the rose-tinted memories that Smith gave us in Just Kids.
He is openly a man of sociopathic ambition who wants sex, fame and
money, and would use anyone to get them. That countercultural drive
echoed what was going on in the 1980s so much that it would become
indistinguishable from mainstream culture. When people talk about the
end of the New York scene, that’s what they mean.

Just as he got
what he wanted, he got sick. This “ruined Cupid”, this beautiful man, we
see skeletal with Aids giving his final party.

“Whether it’s an
orgy or a cocktail party I know how to do it.” He certainly did. It’s
hard to see this vain man visibly dying. But he made his death part of
his art. His 1988 self-portrait with a skull cane
remains a masterpiece. I feel sorry for those who say photography is
not an art. Bowie used his death in his final work too. No hiding away.

She courageously battles the Left's comfortable narrative of the Muslim world

By Jeff Robbins 04/22/16Ayaan
Hirsi Ali can recount in virtual slow motion the events of November 2,
2004—the day Theo Van Gogh, her collaborator on a film about abuse of
women in certain Muslim societies, was assassinated. The Somali-born
women’s rights advocate and writer, then a member of the Dutch
Parliament, had herself received innumerable death threats for writing
the film, entitled Submission. The Dutch Minister of Interior informed her of what had occurred: Mr. Van Gogh
was shot eight times and left on an Amsterdam street with his throat
slit and a large knife stuck in his chest. The killer used a second
knife to attach a note to Mr. Van Gogh’s chest, warning of violence to
Western nations and to Jews, and pronouncing a death sentence against
Ms. Hirsi Ali.

The death sentence began this way: “In the name of
Allah most gracious, most merciful,” and went on to proclaim that “all
enemies of Islam will be destroyed.”

With an estimated 140 million
girls and women throughout the world subjected to genital mutilation,
with thousands murdered each year in so-called “honor killings” and
untold millions forced to marry against their will, one would suppose
that Ms. Hirsi Ali—the world’s preeminent critic of these practices and
advocate on behalf of their victims—would be universally hailed by those
who style themselves as progressives. Since Ms. Hirsi Ali’s advocacy
for women has meant that she has lived under death threats for over a
decade, one would be the more justified in imagining that she would be
regarded as a hero by progressives everywhere. But despite a body of
work as a parliamentarian, a writer and as head of a foundation that is
devoted to the protection of women and has earned her recognition by TIME Magazine
as one of the 100 most important people on the planet, Ms. Hirsi Ali
finds herself the object of vitriol by some on the left, who cannot bear
her for this reason: She is critical
of Islam and what she sees in the Muslim world as not only an
indulgence in violence but a practice of justifying it. Ms. Hirsi Ali
says unapologetically that in Islam there exists a “culture of misogyny
[that] needs to be addressed quickly and frankly, and we must not censor
ourselves.”

But as Ms. Hirsi Ali works to combat those
challenges, she finds herself battling the stubborn, unrelenting forces
that would have her censored. The efforts to tar her with the
tried-and-true epithet of “Islamophobic” come both from powerful Muslim
enterprises that would like to squash her like a bug and some on the
left, for whom a narrative of the Muslim world as victims and the West
as victimizers is precious and comfortable. They regard Ms. Hirsi Ali as
trouble. She is, after all, a Muslim-born woman who personally
experienced the very abuse that she criticizes. The 46-year-old is also a
superb writer, a winning speaker, inarguably courageous and telegenic
to boot. She is an atheist as well. For those who wish to suppress
criticism of the plight of women under Islam, she is, in short, a
disaster.

Ms. Hirsi Ali warns against use of the words “extreme”
and “radical” to describe as peripheral an ideology which, she argues,
is in fact quite prevalent in Muslim communities around the globe, and
which leads easily to violence—whether in the form of female genital
mutilation or honor killings or wife-beating or suicide bombings. She
views the reliance on those words as self-delusion, a soothing,
self-administered palliative whose effect is to mask evidence that
violence is the largely natural extension of fundamentalist values
sternly dictated and widely embraced in Muslim communities—values that
encourage harsh treatment of women and strict, even brutal, punishment
of non-believers. Her warnings, and those of others who risk their
reputations and lives to criticize Islamic institutions, are distinctly
unwelcome in many Western quarters, where they are regarded as
grievously politically incorrect, and where the “few-bad-apples”
narrative of Islamic extremism is vastly preferred.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

For
a week now, experts of all kinds have been trying to understand the
reasons for the attacks in Brussels. An incompetent police force?
Unbridled multiculturalism? Youth unemployment?

Uninhibited Islamism?
The causes are numerous beyond counting and everyone will naturally
choose the one that suits best their own convictions. Law and Order fans
will denounce the haplessness of the police. Xenophobes will blame
immigration. Sociologists will rehash the evils of colonialism.
Urban-planners will point to the evils of ghettoisation. Take your pick.

In
reality, the attacks are merely the visible part of a very large
iceberg indeed. They are the last phase of a process of cowing and
silencing long in motion and on the widest possible scale. Our noses are
endlessly rubbed in the rubble of Brussels airport and in the
flickering candles amongst the bouquets of flowers on the pavements. All
the while, no one notices what's going on in Saint-German-en-Laye.

Last
week, Sciences-Po* welcomed Tariq Ramadan. He's a teacher, so it's not
inappropriate. He came to speak of his specialist subject, Islam, which
is also his religion. Rather like lecture by a Professor of Pies who is
also a pie-maker. Thus judge and contestant both.

No matter, Tariq
Ramadan has done nothing wrong. He will never do anything wrong. He
lectures about Islam, he writes about Islam, he broadcasts about Islam.
He puts himself forward as a man of dialogue, someone open to a debate. A
debate about secularism which, according to him, needs to adapt itself
to the new place taken by religion in Western democracy. A secularism
and a democracy which must also accept those traditions imported by
minority communities. Nothing bad in that. Tariq Ramadan is never going
to grab a Kalashnikov with which to shoot journalists at an editorial
meeting. Nor will he ever cook up a bomb to be used in an airport
concourse. Others will be doing all that kind of stuff. It will not be
his role. His task, under cover of debate, is to dissuade people from
criticising his religion in any way. The political science students who
listened to him last week will, once they have become journalists or
local officials, not even dare to write nor say anything negative about
Islam. The little dent in their secularism made that day will bear fruit
in a fear of criticising lest they appear Islamophobic. That is Tariq
Ramadan's task.

Take this veiled woman. She is an admirable woman.
She is courageous and dignified, devoted to her family and her
children. Why bother her? She harms no one. Even those women who wear
the total, all-encompassing veil do not generally use their clothing to
hide bombs (as certain people were claiming when the law to ban the
burqa was being discussed). They too will do nothing wrong. So why go on
whining about the wearing of the veil and pointing the finger of blame
at these women? We should shut up, look elsewhere and move past all the
street-insults and rumpus. The role of these women, even if they are
unaware of it, does not go beyond this.

The visible part of a very big iceberg.

Take
the local baker, who has just bought the nearby bakery and replaced the
old, recently-retired guy, he makes good croissants. He's likeable and
always has a ready smile for all his customers. He's completely
integrated into the neighbourhood already. Neither his long beard nor
the little prayer-bruise on his forehead (indicative of his great piety)
bother his clientele. They are too busy lapping up his lunchtime
sandwiches. Those he sells are fabulous, though from now on there's no
more ham nor bacon. Which is no big deal because there are plenty of
other options on offer - tuna, chicken and all the trimmings. So, it
would be silly to grumble or kick up a fuss in that much-loved
boulangerie.

We'll get used to it easily enough. As Tariq Ramadan
helpfully instructs us, we'll adapt. And thus the baker's role is done.

Take
this young delinquent. H has never looked at the Quran in his life, he
knows little of the history of religion, of colonialism, nor a great
deal about the proud country of his Maghreb forefathers. This lad and a
couple of his buddies order a taxi. They are not erudite like Tariq
Ramadan, they don't pray as often as the local baker and are not as
observant as the redoubtable veiled mothers on the street. The taxi
heads for Brussels airport. And still, in this precise moment, no one
has done anything wrong. Not Tariq Ramadan, nor the ladies in burqas,
not the baker and not even these idle young scamps.

And yet, none
of what is about to happen in the airport or metro of Brussels can
really happen without everyone's contribution. Because the incidence of
all of it is informed by some version of the same dread or fear. The
fear of contradiction or objection. The aversion to causing controversy.
The dread of being treated as an Islamophobe or being called racist.
Really, a kind of terror. And that thing which is just about to happen
when the taxi-ride ends is but a last step in a journey of rising
anxiety. It's not easy to get some proper terrorism going without a
preceding atmosphere of mute and general apprehension.

These young
terrorists have no need to amass the talents of others, to be erudite,
dignified or hard-working. Their role is simply to provide the end of a
philosophical line already begun. A line which tells us "Hold your
tongues, living or dead. Give up discussing, debating, contradicting or
contesting".

This is not to victimise Islam particularly. For it
has no opponent. It is not Christianity, Hinduism nor Judaism that is
balked by the imposition of this silence. It is the opponent (and
protector) of them all. It is the very notion of the secular. It is
secularism which is being forced into retreat.

Above all, in a
sense, this stops us asking perhaps the world's oldest and most
important question - "How the hell did I end up here?". "How the hell
did I end up having to wander the streets all day with a big veil on my
head?" "How the hell did I end up having to say prayers five times a
day?" " How the hell did I end up in the back of a taxi with three
rucksacks packed with explosives?"

Perhaps, very sadly, the only people
who are still asking themselves that most important of questions are the
unlucky victims. "How the hell did I end up here, six yards away from
that big bomb?"The first task of the guilty is to blame the
innocent. It's an almost perfect inversion of culpability. From the
bakery that forbids you to eat what you like, to the woman who forbids
you to admit that you are troubled by her veil, we are submerged in
guilt for permitting ourselves such thoughts. And that is where and when
fear has started its sapping, undermining work. And the way is marked
for all that will follow.

* Sciences Po is an elite French public research and higher education institution.

Climate change
projections have vastly underestimated the role that clouds play,
meaning future warming could be far worse than is currently projected,
according to new research.

Researchers said that a doubling of
carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere compared with pre-industrial
times could result in a global temperature increase of up to 5.3C – far
warmer than the 4.6C older models predict.

The analysis of
satellite data, led by Yale University, found that clouds have much more
liquid in them, rather than ice, than has been assumed until now.
Clouds with ice crystals reflect more solar light than those with liquid
in them, stopping it reaching and heating the Earth’s surface.

The
underestimation of the current level of liquid droplets in clouds means
that models showing future warming are misguided, says the paper, published in Science. It also found that fewer clouds will change to a heat-reflecting state in the future – due to CO2 increases – than previously thought, meaning that warming estimates will have to be raised.

A
lack of data and continuing uncertainty over the role of clouds is to
blame for the confusion about warming estimates, said Ivy Tan, a
graduate student at Yale who worked on the research with academics from
Yale and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

France is to make it illegal to pay for sex after MPs finally approved new legislation on prostitution following more than two years of rows and opposition by senators.Under
the new law, anyone caught purchasing an act from a sex worker will be
fined and required to attend classes on the harms of prostitution.

There
would be a €1,500 (£1,200) fine for a first offence, rising to €3,750
for a second, which would also be put on the person’s criminal record.
The offender would be forced to attend classes highlighting the harms of
prostitution.

The law was passed by 64 votes to 12 with many MPs absent.

The
French parliament started debating the bill in 2013, but the final vote
was delayed after several hearings owing to sharp divisions between the
lower parliamentary chamber and the senate.

The move makes France
one of only a handful of European countries to follow the Nordic model
of criminalising consumers rather than sex workers. These include Norway
and Iceland. Last year, Northern Ireland introduced legislation to make it the only part of the UK where people can be convicted of paying for sex.

The Socialist MP Maud Olivier, who championed the bill in France, said the aim was to “reduce [prostitution], protect prostitutes who want to leave it and to change mentalities”.

Bringing children into a disintegrating environment used to be a theoretical fear. Now it’s a very real one

The decision whether or not to have a child is one of the bigger ones a person will make in life – often the biggest.

I
needed some strong convincing from my wife when it came time for us to
make it. Most of my reluctance was self-interested: I liked my life well
enough, and I didn’t want to change it. My wife talked about feeling a
biological imperative, which I had no answer for. Who was I to stand in
the way of something like that? I signed on.

But there is a whole
other potential person to consider, too – the new life that you are
bringing into the world without asking first.It’s not really
fair. For while the world is a wonderful place, one we humans have made
nicer for ourselves with wonderful inventions like books and record
players, penicillin and pizza, it’s also a really awful place, one we’ve
ravaged with deforestation and smog, nuclear weapons and mountains of
pizza delivery boxes and other garbage.

The awfulness seems to be
getting worse, especially now that climate change has sped up – sea
level rise that was supposed to take centuries has recently been
projected as taking just decades. This complicates the already difficult
decision of whether to have a kid.

We’re living through what scientists call
the “Sixth Extinction”, an era of precipitous decline in the number of
species able to live on the planet. The last mass extinction, the fifth,
happened 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid crashed into Earth
and 76% of all the species on the planet perished.This time, we’re doing it to ourselves.

“Climate
scientists agree that humanity is about to cause a sea level rise of 20
or 30ft, but they have tended to assume that such a large increase
would take centuries, at least,” the New York Times’s Justin Gillis reported.
But a recent study led by retired Nasa climate scientist James E
Hansen, published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, indicates that
the negative effects are happening a lot faster than we’d thought,
perhaps feet of rise within the next 50 years.

“That would mean
loss of all coastal cities, most of the world’s large cities and all
their history,” Hansen told Gillis, adding, “We’re in danger of handing
young people a situation that’s out of their control.”

Thinking
about the horrific future scientists predict hurts a very specific part
of me, a part of me that I only first learned was there when I met my
newborn son, 11 years ago, as he lay on the tray of the scale where the
doctors had just weighed him and counted his fingers and toes.

The
former is a broad tradition practiced by women and girls across the
world, that varies from the sartorial cloth over the hair as an
extension of the dress or sari, to the more steadfast hijab, which
neatly tucks away all hair, covering the ears and neck but revealing the
face. Then there are variations that proceed towards the complete
coverage of the body including fingers and ankles, where even the
wearer's eyes are hidden, confining their vision to a view mediated by a
mesh screen.

The latter is a ritual with a specific intention to
control female sexuality varying from removal of the clitoris to the
entire genitalia, sewing the vaginal opening shut, leaving a hole just
big enough for urine and menstrual blood to drip out. This ensures that a
woman can be identified as a virgin before marriage and her husband is
the one to execute the gallant act of deflowering. This is precisely why
female circumcision for non-medical reasons is more aptly described as
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Effects of FGM
include infections, painful intercourse, infertility, difficulty in
childbirth and other long-term consequences, which are still being
discovered.

Regardless of how imposing the most extreme form of
the veil can be, it is impermanent, unlike FGM which stings more
destructively, so is it right to conjoin the two in the postmodern
context of rethinking women's agency?
I was to find out that my brazen anti-FGM stance is 'regurgitating the
hideous colonial project that imposed itself on the rest of the world on
a civilizing mission to rescue the women of the third world from its
savage men'. The rationale I am told, is that even as a Nigerian born
woman, I cannot speak for other less privileged Nigerian women, how much
less, a white woman on behalf of ethnic minorities.

It was at
Goldsmiths University that I came to witness this betrayal first hand,
which ascribes brutality onto people from other places as part of
culture but fashions itself so self-righteously. Like John the Baptist
at the feet of Jesus crying; 'Who am I to say that female circumcision
is barbaric, lest I judge thee through my western colonial gaze?'

In the seminar
that alerted me to the pervasiveness of this sinister trend, my
lecturer failed to make a distinction between veiling and FGM, simply
conflating the two as cultural modes of being that are parallel to
western secular thought. The argument for veiling can certainly be made:
Muslim women choosing modesty, piety and privatisation of their own
bodies in order to maintain power - in what they deem a patriarchal
world in which women's bodies are objectified, sexualised and
commodified.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is considering whether North Carolina’s new law on gay and transgender rights makes the state ineligible for billions of dollars in federal aid for schools, highways and housing, officials said Friday.

Cutting
off any federal money — or even simply threatening to do so — would put
major new pressure on North Carolina to repeal the law, which
eliminated local protections for gay and transgender people and
restricted which bathrooms transgender people can use. A loss of federal
money could send the state into a budget crisis and jeopardize services
that are central to daily life.

Although
experts said such a drastic step was unlikely, at least immediately,
the administration’s review puts North Carolina on notice that the new
law could have financial consequences. Gov. Pat McCrory of North
Carolina had assured residents that the law would not jeopardize federal
money for education.

But
the law also represents a test for the Obama administration, which has
declared that the fight for gay and transgender rights is a continuation
of the civil rights era. The North Carolina dispute forces the
administration to decide how aggressively to fight on that principle.

The
North Carolina law created a mandatory statewide anti-discrimination
policy, but it did not include specific protections based on sexual
orientation or gender identity. The law prohibits transgender people
from using public bathrooms that do not match the sexes on their birth
certificates.

It
is more. There has been at least some discussion of how the new law
prohibits a local government or any “political subdivision of the state”
from establishing gender identity as a class protected from employment
discrimination. What has received little attention is how an entire
section of the law has nothing explicit to do with issues of gender
identity. Instead, it prohibits local governments from affecting employment conditions in private companies.

Part 2 of the law,
which reworks the state’s “Wage and Hour Act,” prevents any local
government, whether city, town, or county, from regulating wage levels,
hours of labor, or benefits of private employers. Here is the pertinent
language:

The
provisions of this Article supersede and preempt any ordinance,
regulation, resolution, or policy adopted or imposed by a unit of local
government or other political subdivision of the State that regulates or
imposes any requirement upon an employer pertaining to compensation of
employees, such as the wage levels of employees, hours of labor, payment
of earned wages, benefits, leave, or well-being of minors in the
workforce.

A local government still can
control benefits and compensation of its own employees, although it
cannot place any requirements on contractors it uses to carry out work.
In the past, according to the sections struck, a local government could
place requirements on a contractor so long as it could have imposed the
same requirements on all its employees.

Some of the advances in
battling income inequality have come at the local level. Cities and
counties have set higher minimum wages, regulated the number of hours
employers must provide employees, required that employers give advanced
notice of hours so employees can manage their personal and other work
schedules, and instituted mandatory sick time.

Under HB2, that is not possible in North Carolina.Plus, there’s an additional twist:

A
city [or county] may not require a private contractor under this
section to abide by regulations or controls on the contractor’s
employment practices or mandate or prohibit the provision of goods,
services, or accommodations to any member of the public as a condition
of bidding on a contract or a qualification-based selection, except as
otherwise required by state law.

That would seem
to reinforce the last section of the law, meaning that a locality
couldn’t require a contractor to service any particular group, like
trans people, if not required to by state law.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson